Why Must Widowhood Be So Difficult?
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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know. Kind of tangentially, I guess, related to our ongoing death suite, right? Yeah, I would say so. Sure.

This one, though, was a special request from Yumi, actually. Oh, yeah? Yeah. So, as you know, a few months back in January, Yumi's dad passed away. And it was very, very sad for all of us. I know you remember his name is Bob. And Bob got the biggest laugh of the night at one of our live shows years back. I think it was like Blood Types or something that we did in Atlanta. And as part of the show...

You tested my blood type live on stage because I had no idea what my blood type was. And right before you were about to read the results, Bob shouted out from the audience, Josh is pregnant. Oh, man. Still gets laughs. I didn't know that was him at the time either. And it was made even better when I found that out after. Yeah. He was a great guy and we miss him big time.

And so as after her father passed, Yumi started helping her mom, like make sure her affairs are in order and all that stuff. And she was just kind of researching, I think, probably Social Security benefits or something like that. And it becomes clear as you just start to kind of look into what happens after you have a spouse that that dies, right?

You realize like the person who survives the spouse goes through like a kind of like a legal and in the past a social transition that they had no say in or nothing to do with. They just happened to have the misfortune of losing a spouse. And we call those people widows or widowers depending on their sex. But it's far more interesting than you would guess at first glance or first thought, it turns out.

Yeah. And when you said change in social status, that's, you know, referring to like, you know, a lot of places because there are still many places in the world where when the husband dies, the widow undergoes a pretty devastating social change. Yeah. And we're going to cover all that stuff. For sure. So just to make a quick distinction, widower, that refers to a man who has whose spouse has died.

And apparently adding ER to the end of widower makes it the only suffix that changes gender in the English language from female to male. Everything else goes the opposite way.

Yes, that is correct. I thought that was pretty interesting. Yeah, it's a good little factoid that Dave dug up for us. The actual word widow is from the early 14th. I almost said firsteenth, but that's not a thing. No, it never has been and never will be. Early 14th century, and it comes from a...

Proto-Indo-European word, it looks like, at least, W-I-D-H-E-W-O. You're not going to try it? No, are you? Widowo. I think that was perfect. I'm sure some Proto-Indo-European just heard that through the halls of time and was like, you got that right. Say it again. Widowo. That's my new ringtone. I think I got a clean copy. Okay.

Got a clean take on that one. So that means to be empty, to be separated, to be bereft or solitary. So pretty on the nose. And, you know, depending on when you had a spouse die in history, you might have been called a relict with a T or maybe just solitaire. But it seems like widow became the name that stuck and that widower followed.

the name widow, correct? Yeah, in the 14th century, which is way earlier than I assumed. But the reason that widow existed, the word long before widow were, is because the concept of a man being a widow or a widower was totally foreign to the world. Basically, any civilization that ever existed, it's

said, you lost your wife. Sorry about that. This has absolutely no bearing on anything in your life, financial, social, political, nothing. It just had no effect on you whatsoever. But the reason that women had a special designation when they lost a spouse is because, as we were saying, things just completely changed.

And I know I've been beating that drum a little bit, and we'll get into it a little bit later, but I think that's a really good kind of revelation about why widow existed long before widow were. Because just for men, it just didn't have any effect aside from the loss of the spouse. Yeah, which is a huge effect. Yeah, but I mean, also, I think a lot of marriages were social contracts, and I'm sure that there were plenty of men who was like, oh, I'm spouseless now. Oh, well.

So there have been way more widows than widowers as well, because historically, um,

women outlive their partners. That's just sort of how it always has been and it's still that way today. That's even accounting for just the shockingly high number of women who died during childbirth in ancient times and even not so long ago. It was pretty common, but still, even given that, way more widows than widowers. Right now in the U.S., there are about 14 million of both widows

11 of which are widows, 3 million are widowers. And that tracks pretty closely. I think that's about 4% of adults in the U.S. and tracks pretty closely to our friends in Australia. And then in the U.K., they're a little bit higher at 6%. Right.

And we also need to point out that once you if you remarry, then you are no longer considered a widow or widower. So those statistics are for people who have not been remarried, because once you get hitched again, you go to fill out a census form or maybe tax forms or something. You are officially just married again. Right. Right.

And great for you. Yeah. So it's kind of hard to calculate the exact number of how many widows that have ever lost a spouse or how many people have ever lost a spouse or alive in any country at any given time. It's even harder worldwide because...

In the United States, in the UK, in Australia, we keep pretty good records. We keep track of people like widows and groups like that. In other countries where they have other stuff that they're dealing with, like, say, civil war or famine, it's much harder to keep track of that kind of thing, which is ironic because those kind of things can produce widows at much greater frequency than, say, you know, not being in a civil war, not enduring a famine. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. The UN estimated in 2016 that there were about 258 million widows all around the world, and 10% of those lived in what they called extreme poverty. And about 1.3536 million of those were child widows, which is to say they are people whose spouse died

Before they were the age of 18. And we should note a lot of those are forced marriages. But nevertheless, that's a child widow. Yeah. And then, again, one other shocking statistic that I was just knocked over by in the DRC, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the UN estimates that 50 percent of all women living there are widows. Sure.

So in those same countries where it's hard to keep track, some of the more developing countries, that's where widows are the most mistreated. And in fact, there's a push to kind of try to get the UN even more involved in the mistreatment of widows and curing that kind of thing. I saw a quote somewhere. It said that the mistreatment of widows is one of the greatest issues facing developing nations today.

It's that bad and it's that prevalent, it's that widespread in cultures around the world because it seems to be rooted in a patriarchal society. And the more deeply patriarchal a society is, the worse widows seem to be treated.

Yeah, and the UN in 1979 adopted a treaty called the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, CDAW, if you're an acronymist. Acronymist. Acronymist. Yeah.

But there that doesn't cover anything about widows in that treaty. There are this group called Widows for Peace who have been lobbying the UN to say, hey, you need to do something explicitly for widows, like a widow's charter or something and add this to that. But that has not happened yet. Right.

We'll talk a little more about, or we'll talk a lot more about how widows are mistreated around the world. And it turns out, as we'll see, it's a really ancient practice. But kind of going back to the U.S., the U.K., Australia today, one of the things, one of the findings that studies have come up with is that

Men in particular, when they lose a spouse, suffer more greatly today than widows do, which is the reverse of how it used to be. Yeah. You're talking about the widowhood effect? Yes, exactly. Okay.

Yeah, so that's when your partner dies, your spouse dies, and you have literal, obviously emotionally bereft and problems like that, but also elevated mortality risk. A lot of that can come from emotional distress, but actual deteriorating physical health. And it seems to be even worse with widowers than widows,

which is why men tend to get remarried after their spouse dies at a much higher rate. And I've even witnessed this just, what do you call it when it's just stuff you've witnessed? Observed it.

Oh, yeah, but there's another word. I can't think of it. I know people are screaming in their cars right now. But I've seen it around me when I've known plenty of people, thankfully, mostly elderly folks whose longtime spouses died. And while the women, the widows have been obviously upset and had to deal with that kind of thing, the few widowers that I've known

Just had a much, much, much harder time just living life and going on with life. Yeah, I found a quote from a guy who is the chairman of the Center of Healthy Aging at the University of Utah, Michael Caserta. And he said that, you know, men and women who lose their spouses like that sucks for both of them. But men take it like he said, it's like the loss is like a dismemberment.

as if they lost the thing that kept them organized and whole. And so, like you said, as a result, widowers tend to remarry at much higher rates than widows within, say, two years. I think there was a study from 96 that everybody cites, and I can't find more recent numbers. But back then, from this study, they found that 60% of widowers remarried within two years versus 19% of widows remarried.

So I think part of that is this desire to be like, my life is falling apart because I don't have a wife any longer. And apparently I need that kind of help. So I'm going to go out and find another wife and be married again. Whereas with widows, that doesn't seem to be as necessary. But for both, the risk of death, and this is ultimately what the widowhood effect is,

Your risk of death just increases simply by being a widow or a widower. Yeah. It's almost as if in marriages that women seem to be the moral center and rock and guiding light of the couple. Almost as if. Almost as if. That's the case in my marriage, at least. Oh, yeah. Same here.

Yeah. So it doesn't surprise me that that's what I've seen with my own eyeballs, and the data seems to back that up as well. It does. There's your answer right there, Fishbulb. So you want to take a break? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. We're taking a break, everybody. We just decided. We'll be right back.

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All right, everybody, we're back and we are going to go back in time. We promised a little bit more talk on the ancient world. And, you know, we've kind of hinted around and maybe even outright said it in part one that the dimensions of widowhood are basically twofold.

There's the personal loss and what that means to the person. But then there's how you're viewed in society and in your culture. And it is a...

That historically has been almost, well, I would say not almost, I would say worse, like the cultural and societal aspects of how you're treated. And that's on top of already feeling that loss, even though, you know, a lot of, you know, a lot of the marriages back then were sort of contractual.

and a little less based on like, oh, we met at the soda shop and fell in love, sharing a milkshake. A lot of those couples did fall in love with one another and learn to love one another and depend on one another. So it's still a loss, maybe not quite the kind of emotional love loss impact that you might think of today, but still a loss. And then you have society all around you, in most cases, essentially saying like,

you're a tainted woman now. Yeah. In the ancient world, widows, orphans, and strangers, which meant foreigners or refugees,

were essentially considered outlaws. And that doesn't mean that they were necessarily criminals. To be outlaw, I learned this from Dave Kustin. He sent a request for an article or for an episode a while back about outlaw status. So I looked into it. It is definitely worth at least a short stuff. But in a nutshell, outlaw status means that you are no longer under the protection of the law.

which means that people can do things to you. They can take your land. They can beat you up. They can murder you in, I'm sure, the most extreme cases and not be penalized. So it makes you like you just don't have any protection any longer. And that's how widows were treated in the ancient world, which is nuts because, again, they didn't do anything. They just lost their spouse.

And one of the things that I think society kind of tried to do to keep the widow in the fold was to say, hey, we have a great solution here. You know how your spouse who just died, your husband who just died, had a brother?

Well, we think you should marry him and start bearing his children. And then the firstborn son you have, you can name it after your dead husband. How about that, everybody? And everyone started jumping up and down in their gladiator sandals, and it became custom and tradition. And she's like, I didn't even want to marry the first guy. Right. I didn't want to marry your first son, much less his uglier little brother. Right. And that's not just an ancient thing. Like, I don't know. I tried to find out when that kind of

stopped being a thing but like i've seen at least i feel like three western films and these are you know movies of course but it's not like they're just making this stuff up but i've seen at least three westerns where the the plot was you know a woman's husband dies out on the range or something and she's shunned and left alone and expected to marry that guy's brother

Yeah. And I think in some cases, like I'm sure there were women who were like, I didn't really love your brother anyway. I just want a house and a place for my kids to grow up. So sure, let's do this. Or Civil War too. I feel like that's been like that went through the Civil War. I know that happened. Did you ever see The Wind?

The Wind. I can't remember who directed it. It was a woman director who just did an amazing job. It was almost entirely shouldered by a woman actor. It's set in like the 19th century out on the prairie. And it's almost like a supernatural drama. It's like a drama with supernatural tinges to it. And it is really good, dude. You would like it a lot. I'm really surprised you haven't seen it. Do you know who stars in it?

I don't. I'll look it up on the next ad break, okay? I'm too much of a pro to look it up now. Is it Meteor City? Yeah. Have you seen Meteor City? It's about this really overbearing husband who leaves instructions for his wife to follow and she ends up killing him. Should we tell people what we're talking about or just leave that for us? Or just cut this out? No, no. It's fine. Whatever you want to do, buddy.

All right, because I don't think it'll make it into the episode, but Josh made a joke about Meteor City and our recording on Tuesday, and I didn't get it. And then literally the next day, I was like, wait a minute, he's talking about asteroids. It was. But I felt very dense because I was like, I don't get your joke. Right, because it was just one of those times where I just toss out a random thing that doesn't have anything to do with anything, and I just got it so, so wrong. But that's hilarious that you realized what I was saying the next day.

Yeah, they call that a way homer because you only get it on the way home. Very nice. But there's one thing to say about that whole forcing your daughter-in-law to marry your other son. It's called a leveret marriage. Lever, L-E-V-I-R, meant brother-in-law from like a proto-Indo-European word. So it's as old as the word widow.

And it is a very ancient tradition. And like you said, there were Westerns that had that as part of the plot, if not the plot. It also still goes on today in cultures around the world. So it's a really old custom and tradition that I'm sure it does. It keeps the widow in the fold socially, because if she says, no, I don't really want to do that.

Society says, okay, well, you can go live on the margins of society as an outlaw because your husband died. Sorry. Go away forever. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, the other obvious thing here is if you're not granted many legal rights and your husband has died.

you have to then survive financially, and you might have kids to care for, or they may try to take your kids away from you. Dave found a survey of wills from 15th century England. I believe it was sort of more rural England and not London. But 72% of deceased men had surviving wives.

So there was a great, great number of men dying and all these women all of a sudden that were like, how do I provide? You know, it could be even at a very young age. How do I provide for myself? And a lot of times it was just the resourcefulness of that woman to go out and apply whatever trade she might be good at on almost like a small business. Like, you know, I'll become a seamstress or I will start like baking and selling goods online.

just to raise money to live and eat and survive. Yeah. She also might depend on the church. She might depend on charitable organizations. She might depend, if she's lucky, on her in-laws who don't cast her out. Because ultimately, the reason why widows tend to be cast out is, number one, it's a patriarchal society. Is it just patriarchal or patriarchal? Because you know me, I add syllables. I think...

I think it's patriarchal. Okay. Wait, you just said a combination of the two. I don't know what it is then. Everyone knows what we mean. Societies that are really based on a patriarchy, they tend to have traditions where inheritance is passed down through the male lineage. It's called primogenitor. That's right. It's the reason for anybody who watched Downton Abbey, it's the reason why the guy who owned Downton Abbey –

wasn't able to leave the estate for his daughters because they were women and he didn't have any male heirs. So apparently, I didn't watch Downton Abbey, but I read about it recently. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Okay, cool. So you know what I'm talking about, right? Tell me if I get this right, right? Okay. So along comes Olaf, the snowman, and he comes in and he says, I've got a solution, everybody. Am I still on point? Yeah.

Yeah. So there seemed to be like there was like a distant relative of the dad of the patriarch of Downton Abbey who stood to inherit the place, right? Yeah, I think that was right. And only because that guy was a man. It passed right past the daughters who by any rights are rightful heirs because they were daughters. So if you were a wife who married into a family –

You weren't even a daughter. Like, nothing went to you. And so your in-laws had zero obligation in a lot of cultures for a very long time to take care of you at all. They could cast you out, especially if they didn't like you in the first place. And you could go from being a wealthy woman.

to literally living in a cave in the woods in the outskirts of town trying to survive. That's where a lot of the images of witches came from. They were widows who were cast out and had to make a home for themselves in the woods. And yes, they had a taste for little children who ended up getting lost in the woods and finding their house that they built out of candy. But essentially at the outset, it wasn't their fault. Yeah.

Yeah. And, you know, to be clear, it was a very obviously a society based around the idea of the patriarch patriarchy. Man, we are getting this all wrong.

But it wasn't necessarily just big groups of men saying, no, you're not getting your hands on this money. Many, many times it was the sisters-in-law and the mothers-in-law or mothers and sisters of the deceased son that are like, oh, no, no, no, no. You're not getting your hands on this money. Like you're no longer in our family. Yeah, because I'm sure those sisters or the mother, they had sons who stood to gain that, not the daughter-in-law.

Yeah. Keep it in the family basically was the sort of drumbeat, I think. And it still is in a lot of cultures where widows are mistreated. That ultimately seems to be the basis of all of the mistreatment is the family is seeking to keep their family estate or fortune or whatever intact. Yeah. Man, that's tough stuff. Yeah. Especially if you've

You know, it worked really hard to become a part of this family. You know, you had to put up with a lot of those family Thanksgiving, you know, and now you're being cast out to live in a cave or a house built of candy.

Yeah, the English common law did a little bit better job trying to take care of women in the States back to the Middle Ages under these dower laws, D-O-W-E-R, which is not dowry. A dowry is what a woman's family brings to the marriage. Like here, marry my daughter and you can have all this land and all these cows and stuff like that. But they do come from the same root word. But in the early dower laws,

It was a marital contract basically that says, hey, at the very least, if your husband dies, you can live in that house still. The most bare bones assurance. Sure. But it was something at least. And I'm surprised how far back it dated that there were any laws for widows in the Middle Ages. Yeah.

Here we are. And then by the 14th and 15th centuries, that whole concept had evolved into a specific concrete number. One third. The widow was entitled to one third of her dead husband's estate. That was a dower. And a dower, a widow with a dower was known as a dowager. It meant that she was not totally effed. She was down a spouse, but she wasn't living in a cave now.

Yeah. And more Downton Abbey, of course, the Dowager Countess. Sure. Great Maggie. Oh, gosh. What's her last name? Gyllenhaal. I'm not with it. Maggie Gyllenhaal was the Dowager Countess.

The other thing, too, about that dower as far as the one third is the other thing. I'm not sure if it could mean or what the discrepancy is, but they were guaranteed one third, not income that was produced by their deceased husband's land, but one third of the interest of the income, which is not great.

No. I also saw in cases where the family would just buy the spouse off because they would have to give her

money whenever they sold the land down the line. And if they wanted to sell it, they'd just be like, here, here's your cut. Just go away kind of thing. So I'm not sure. Like for $255? Yeah, exactly. Right. Oh, no, wait, that's the U.S. government. We'll get to that. So eventually dower ship evolved into a separate thing that it didn't take it over. They became two separate things. And I believe like at the outset of the marriage, while the marriage contract was being negotiated, the

The wife's family would be like, here's her dowry. And the husband's family would say, okay, well, this is what her jointure is going to be. And jointure was an actual set amount that was negotiated at the outset before the marriage actually took place of how much the wife would get.

for the rest of her life in the event of her husband's death. And it was very frequently larger than a dower, but it could also be less than a dower. And as long as there was a dower available, she could choose the larger of the two. That's right. I don't know about you guys, but it was very simple when Emily and I drew up our marital contract. We said, we both said, we bring nothing into this marriage. Our families have nothing. That does make it easier.

We're getting married anyway. I said, I'm only bringing poor communication habits into this marriage. I'm going to try and get better at those. And Emily said, well, I'm bringing great communication to this marriage. So we should balance out nicely. And then the next paragraph was from you saying, but have you seen my car? Right. Oh, man. I'm trying to think of what car I had. Didn't you have a big hootie for a while back then?

Well, I had a Plymouth Valiant, a 75 Valiant, but I sold that in LA. We moved back to Atlanta and I drove this, I bought a gold Civic station wagon, like a 70 or like an 82 gold Civic station wagon that for like a thousand bucks. And that actually may be the car I had when we got married. Very nice. Now that I'm thinking. Yeah.

Yeah. Anyway, that's what I brought to the marriage. That was my dowry. It was your dowry. What's that gold civic? So one other reason that all of this stuff was necessary and one other reason that women were just suddenly able to be cast out of society on the death of their husband was because of the concept of coverture. And put simply, coverture meant that when you became a married woman, a wife, right?

your husband's legal, political, economic personhood covered you. You became an extension of him.

Anything you brought to the marriage, if you happen to have a job, let's say you're a brewer. Remember the beer used to be brewed by women at first? Let's say you were the local brewer. Those wages went right to your husband. You had no right to them whatsoever. You guys bought some land together. You have no right to it whatsoever. You're covered by your husband. Your husband dies if there's not laws in place to keep you intact socially and

Your personhood's gone. Like, your husband died. You were part of your husband. Ergo, socially speaking, legally speaking, you died too. Go live in a candy house. Yeah. But if your husband died, ironically, you gained more—

independence, I guess, of in your finances, because all of a sudden you could buy and sell property and enter into a contract. Although conversely and weirdly, um, you were not automatically like if your husband died, it's not like, well, you know, now you, you and your three kids will, we'll go and just live in this place that you were able to get. Um,

A lot of times those kids were considered orphans and they had to fight in court for guardianship as the real sole parent and bearer of those children. Yeah, I looked into that because I couldn't understand why that would be. And it turns out some cultures, still today apparently this is a problem in Afghanistan too, but in the past as well in the West, some cultures were so...

patriarchy minded that when a child's father died they were considered orphans even if their mother was alive because the father was dead so they were basically parentless that's how much of the personhood of the father or of the husband um covered the wife that her own children were considered orphans she's like hey i'm right here perfectly able to take care of them didn't matter they were legally considered orphans because their father had died isn't that nuts

Yeah. I mean, that's that was one of those things where I didn't bother looking up because I figured that's exactly what it was and that's what it was. I couldn't guess that because I just couldn't wrap my mind around it, Chuck. Yeah. So in 1771, there was a pretty baby step forward as far as financial rights go in the United States when I guess not United States yet. Right. No. In the colonies. Right.

Yeah. New York passed a law that said, all right, if you got a big dowry from your wife's family and the husband just wants to like sell that thing off, now you have to at least get the wife's consent to sell their own family. That's nuts.

And in 1839, Mississippi was the first state to allow a woman to own property in their own name. And if you're like, wow, Mississippi, that's kind of hard to believe they were that progressive and forward thinking. Very sadly, the property that we're talking about here were enslaved people. So they were saying, if your husband dies...

As a woman, you can go and then buy enslaved people on your own. Yeah, that did kind of kick off a spate of married women's property acts that just kind of, like you said, small little steps of they can inherit money, they can keep their wages. What was crazy in 1870, Britain passed an act like that, but it wasn't retroactive. It was for all future marriages after the act was passed, which must have sucked for the people who were already married.

And then in 1849, you had that 1771 law in New York that required consent from the husband to sell property from the dowry. In 1849, in California, at least, in their constitution, they were the first state that said, you know what? If a woman comes into the marriage with property assets, then that's separate property. That's hers. The husband can't sell it off if this is something the wife is going to count on after you die. Right.

And then by the 20th century, coverture was pretty much gone in America, the UK. But there was this kind of move to codify what had been going on in other cultures for a while, depending on the culture you were in, depending on what colony you were in, depending on what European country you were in. You may already have been able to inherit all of your husband's land, wages, businesses in some cases.

And that's where we get the concept of the merry widow. Like, it's a very, like, distinct character in European literature. Like, I think one appears in the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, The Wife of Bath, I believe, where they're just, like, always in a good mood. They have money. They're independent. They don't take any guff from anybody. And the reason why is because

In some cultures, the widow was kind of like this liminal legal person. Not a woman because she wasn't repressed. Not a man because she was still a woman. But she had way more freedom, way more initiative. Her husband died wealthy. Way more means. And some women actually took their husband's businesses over and made them better. And in fact, Veuve Clicquot, the champagne brand,

Veuve is widow in French. So the widow Clicquot took over her husband's champagnery and made it what it is today. Isn't that nuts?

That's great. So there was like a thread of like the like your life could be way better off if you didn't like your wealthy husband and he passed while you still had plenty of healthy years ahead of you. You could be a merry widow. But for the vast majority of women at the time, it was much more like we were talking about where you're just in trouble and at the mercy of your in-laws or the local church's charity. All right. Should we take a break? Yeah. All right. We'll be right back.

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All right, Chuck. So there's another tradition that still goes on today that I just find fascinating. It's called the widow succession. And in the United States and the UK, if an elected official, say a member of parliament or a senator, dies while in office, it's totally normal for their widow to take their seat for the rest of their term. Yeah. And in fact, that was...

One of the only ways a woman could hold office back then is if their husband kicked it and everyone was like, no, she's probably, I guess, got the same outlook on things and the same values. Married couples tend to share things like that. I guess it wouldn't be like a James Carville situation. Oh, what was his wife's name? It was they were very famous for being on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Mary Madeline.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. Anyway, that aside, um, in the past it was, um,

You know, you were sort of allowed to be and accepted socially as a replacement. I believe the second female member of parliament came in 1921 with Maggie Wintringham. And that was because her husband died and she got in there and did a lot of great work. She lowered the voting age for women from 30 all the way down to 21 and fought for equal guardianship.

um, over children. So it was, you know, she, she came along and wasn't just like, well, I'm just going to sort of sit in for my husband. She was like, I got some ideas of my own. Um, so yeah, this was not like an isolated incident. It still goes on today. I think there was,

A seat that was taken over by a widow as recently as like 2021, maybe. And prior to 1976, 73% of all of the U.S. senators who were women and 50% of all women House of Representative members had become senators and congresswomen because their politician husbands had died and they succeeded them in their seat. Yeah. Pretty interesting. Yeah.

Yeah. And there was a woman named Hattie Wyatt Carraway. She was the very first in 1932 to be selected just on her own right. She did take over for her husband, but then they reelected her because they thought she was doing a bang up job. Pretty great. Yeah. So, boy, do we get to talk about.

The U.S. government and Social Security now? Yeah, why not? So we can leave everyone on an angry note? Yeah, this is pretty crazy. So there's something called the widow's penalty. Had you heard of it before?

Oh, sure.

then you get the higher amount of whoever got the most, but you lose yours, right? So let's say your husband got more than you did in Social Security benefits every month. You get his amount, but you lose yours. So no matter how it goes, you're still taking a hit, a reduction in income. And yet— Even though you both paid into it for your entire working career. Exactly. Exactly.

We also have another thing here in the United States called the required minimum distribution. And that is where we have like IRAs and 401ks where you save for retirement and you defer taxation. But eventually the government's like, okay, we want to tax that stuff now. So you have to withdraw X dollars every year.

That doesn't change, even though you're only trying to fund your life, not yours and your spouse's life. So you have a loss of income, a bunch of money that's being taxed, and you no longer can file jointly. You file separately, I think, after the first two tax returns after your spouse dies. And so all of a sudden your tax is up. Your income goes down, and yet your taxes go up substantially. That's the widow's penalty. Right.

Yeah, and, you know, I guess it makes sense to not be able to file jointly for the rest of your life. But it is just, like, thievery that you pay into Social Security your entire life, both partners in a relationship like that, and then you're not allowed to both keep that money. Like, you ought to be able to will your Social Security benefits to whoever you want. Yeah, I agree. And keep your own. Yeah, the government says... It's just...

Yeah. It's one of those things. It's just, uh, it's just not right. Um, and speaking of things that aren't right. And we promised to leave you on a sour note with social security. We're going to leave you on a more sour note to talk a little bit as promised about how in over the world today in some countries, how widows are still, um,

mistreated. Um, some of this stuff is fairly shocking. So, you know, trigger warning, um, in Nigeria, there are traditional customs, uh, to where you, um, shave the widow's head, whether she wants that or not. Um, she can be isolated from the family. She can be isolated from her own children, uh, for months. Um, they require her to visibly mourn and wail, um,

Um, they can restrict her food and drink, and sometimes they can force her to drink her husband's, um, bath water, essentially the water that was used to wash the husband's dead body. Sometimes they make her do the washing too. And then the drinking.

So there's actually like cultural reasons for this. And one is that there's often a suspicion among cultures that the wife had a hand in the death of her husband. And even if he was out plowing the fields and slipped and somehow fell in front of the plow and cut himself in half.

That could be witchcraft. As a matter of fact, that's probably witchcraft. And so who else would want to bewitch a husband more than his wife because he was kind of a jerk after all. So you have to kind of prove that you didn't want your husband to die, that you're actually mourning him. And one way to do that is to bathe his dead body and then drink the water afterward. Like sociologically speaking, it's a way to just keep women completely subjugated.

And they also frequently force widows to have like a purification sex with a stranger. Sometimes the brother-in-law, that's another ongoing tradition. And then other times it could be like there's a village like sex guy who like that's what he does. Like if you're a widow, you have to purify yourself by having sex with this one designated person.

And, you know, speaking of the witch thing, that's not just, you know, ancient times. In Tanzania from 2005 to 2009, not very long ago, there were more than 2,500 elder widows who were killed there because of alleged witchcraft. Right. So it's something that's still happening. Yeah.

There's another practice that is supposedly gone now, was rooted out or stamped out among Hindu people, especially in India and Bangladesh. There's a practice called sati, very famous practice where the wife, the widow threw herself on her husband's funeral pyre and burned herself to death at his funeral.

And she was expected to do that on her own, but there was tremendous social pressure for her to do it. Like she basically didn't have any other options aside from like, imagine having no other options, but to throw yourself on a funeral pyre and burn yourself alive. That's your best option. That was kind of what, how Sati was carried out. It was also sometimes done by burying this, the widow with her husband, burying her alive. And so that the last response,

The first recorded ritual sati that was ever performed came in 1987. An 18-year-old named Roop Kanwar threw herself on her husband's funeral pyre after being married just a few months because that was what was expected of her.

Jeez. And, you know, that is, like you said, a practice that isn't really happening anymore. But there are some, you know, some of the more conservative Hindu families can still maybe not throw yourself on a pyre, but it's a shameful thing to be a widow. You're not allowed to remarry. You have to basically shut yourself away in the house and wear mourning clothing everywhere.

And, you know, you might just be abandoned, just like in ancient times. Yeah, by your kids even, not just your in-laws. Your own children might be like, you're a widow now, go away. Yeah. So spare a thought for widows on this International Widows Day on June 23rd. There's a lot of ground still to be covered, for sure. For sure. If you want to know more about widows and widowers, there's plenty to read on the Internet. So go do that if you like. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. Listener Mail.

All right, I got one. Let's follow up on New York City trash. This is from Jim Reagan. And Jim is kind of close to our age and grew up in New York City. And Jim's dad was a New York City cop and was alive during the... The Wildcat strike? Yeah, the strike of 1981.

I was in the fifth grade at the time. So Jim says this. His dad often told this story, so he's doing his best job here to retell this story. So there was a guy there who I believe was a super for a small apartment building in Hell's Kitchen maybe, owned two hatchback cars like a VW Rabbit or something.

And you know back then they had just regular handles with push buttons, so if they weren't locked you could just open the back of the car. So this enterprising man, taking advantage of the holiday season, as well as human nature, gift-wrapped all his garbage and put it in unlocked hatchbacks every night.

leaving it out there on the streets in plain view looking like Christmas joy and glory. You guessed it, the garbage was stolen by thieves every night. Maybe the most New York story I've ever heard. So resilient. The look on those crooks' faces when ripping open the presents just to find trash is a really funny thing to think about. It still makes me laugh. And I've told this story many times over many a pint and many a pub.

And that is good. I'm a forever fan. Looking forward to my first live show. So, Jim Reagan, you must be coming to our show at Town Hall in New York. So, I think by the time this comes out, you will have already seen us. So, I hope you enjoyed the show. Yeah, I hope you enjoyed the show, Jim. Let us know. Yeah. That's a great story. That was fantastic. Thank you for writing that in, Jim. If you want to be like Jim and send in a wonderful story, we would love to hear that. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, send it off to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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Hi, icons. It's Paris Hilton. Check out my new single, Chasin', featuring Meghan Trainor. Out today.

I feel so lucky to collaborate with Megan and how perfectly she put my experience into words. Listen to Chasen from my new album, Infinite Icon, on iHeartRadio or wherever you stream music. Don't forget to visit InfiniteIcon.com to pre-save my album. Sponsored by 1111 Media.